Page 3 - CEGE Magazine Fall 2022

CEGENEWS
UNIVERSITY
The U of M Twin Cities ranked No. 23 nationwide in the U.S. News and World Report rankings, our highest ranking
in 12 years. The Academic Ranking of World Universities (aka The Shanghai Ranking) ranked the U of M no. 44 worldwide, and placed the Twin Cities campus at 25 in the U.S. and 10 among public universities. Washington Month- ly’s 2022 College Guide ranked the U
of M Twin Cities as a top-20 U.S. public university. Forbes ranked the U of M Twin Cities as a top-25 public institution in 2022. Among engineering programs, CivE was ranked 17th, and EnvE ranked 11th by U.S. News.
FACULTY
PAUL CAPEL hosted a group of nine scientists from Brazil and Paraguay in August 2022, as part of an international cooperation with the U.S. Geological Survey. The visiting scientists repre- sented the Brazilian Federal University for Latin American Integration (UNILA) and Itaipu Binacional, a bi-national hydropower agency and facility that supplies all of the electricity to Paraguay and a major portion of power to Brazil. While in Minnesota, the visiting scien- tists observed research and teaching laboratories and talked with researchers about issues of soil erosion and transport of sediment, nutrients, and man-made chemicals.
XUE FENG, McKnight Land-Grant Assistant Professor, has received a research award in the amount of $505,165 over three years to study snow hydrology. Salli Dymond (Institute on the
Environment) is her co-principal investi- gator. The researchers propose to look at how forest controls snowpack timing and duration, and how that gets medi- ated by frost and lateral flow of water. They will use models and field measure- ments from a catchment in northern Minnesota.
QIZHI HE received a U of M Informatics Institute seed grant award. He and Ju Sun are developing a physics aware machine learning framework to help predict and reduce defects in metal additive manufacturing (3D printing). Their novel, knowledge-augmented, machine learning tool will quickly and reliably predict thermal mechanical behavior and the induced defects by using thermomechanical models and process monitoring data.
MIKI HONDZO was elected to a three- year term on the National Harmful
Algal Bloom (HAB) Committee (NHC). The mission of the NHC is to facilitate coordination and communication of activities for the U.S. HAB community at a national level, to provide a collective voice of the academic, management, and stakeholder communities interested in national issues related to harmful algal bloom.
JOHN HOURDOS is part of an Inter- Sections grant project. InterSections
is a new research funding initiative
by the College of Science and Engi- neering; its goal is to bring together resources from around the College to encourage intersectional, collaborative research. Hourdos was instrumental
in connecting Sarah Swisher from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Andreas Stein from Chem- istry, Philippe Buhlmann also from Chemistry, and Arthur Erdman from
Mechanical Engineering. The team will be prototyping a continuously moni- toring sensor, so doctors can do some experimentation. And secondly, they will work on creating such a device at the nanoscale. Their goal is to use the InterSections seed funding to demon- strate the feasibility of manufacturing a kind of nano-needle that can measure what is desired, and then to develop a micro-electronic that allows doctors to receive continuous measurements.
ALIREZA KHANI presented his research as part of a panel at the ATA Conference. The panel titled “Recom- mendations for Developing Charging Station Infrastructure for Commercial Fleet Operations” was picked up in the Transport Topics, a newsletter for the Trucking and Freight Transportation industries (March 21, 2022).
JIA-LIANG LE and JOE LABUZ received $457,000 over three years through an NSF Grant for their project, “Objective Stochastic Modeling of Quasibrittle Damage and Failure Through Mech- anistic Mapping of Random Fields.” Understanding stochastic structural response is central to reliability-based engineering designs. Quasibrittle structures can exhibit complicated failure mechanisms governed by varying material length scales. Without considering these length-scale vari- ations when modeling the random constitutive properties, stochastic finite element simulation (a tool widely used to investigate the probabilistic behavior of structures) can be severely limited in its prediction capacity. The goal of this research is to develop a new computa- tional framework for stochastic analysis of quasibrittle damage and fracture. The framework is anchored by a mecha- nism-based projection of random fields of constitutive properties onto the finite elements. The model will be validated through a unique set of experimental data on the effects of specimen size and geometry on the probabilistic failure of a porous rock. The research will be integrated with educational activities for
University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering | DEPARTMENT OF CIVIL, ENVIRONMENTAL, AND GEO- ENGINEERING 3